Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

A Throw That Made a Phenomenon

It took 125 years for Major League Baseball to get its first Japanese position player.

It took 1,278 hits in Japan’s Pacific League for Ichiro Suzuki to become that player.

On April 11, 2001, playing in his eighth major league game, it took Suzuki just eight seconds to go from curiosity to phenomenon.

Over the next 12 seasons, Suzuki, who joined the Yankees last week, would set himself apart from the average baseball player in a number of ways, but it all started with one sensational throw.

Suzuki entered that April game as a pinch-hitter and took over right field in the bottom of the eighth inning in front of a hostile Oakland Coliseum crowd. The night before, racial slurs had been yelled at him while fans threw change and other objects onto the field, none of which appeared to affect his cool demeanor.

With Terrence Long on first base and one out, Ramon Hernandez laced a single to right. Suzuki charged hard on the bouncing ball as Long rounded second and headed for third. Suzuki gloved the ball and with uncanny precision made the transition into his exaggerated throwing motion to go for the out.

At the time Suzuki released the ball, Long was well on his way to third. The ball came out of Suzuki’s hand unusually low and hard, as if fired from a rifle. David Bell, the Mariners’ third baseman, stood straight up, shifting to his right, never expecting there to be a play. Just as Long broke into his slide, Bell held his glove low and the ball arrived, seemingly never having traveled more than six or seven feet off the ground.

With a flick of the wrist of no more than a few inches, Bell tagged out Long.

The entire play took eight seconds from the crack of the bat to the umpire’s calling out Long.

Bell, who now manages the Class AAA Louisville Bats, remembers the play well.

“I just remember what a great tag it was,” Bell said, with a laugh. “I didn’t do anything — that’s what was so amazing about it. I didn’t have to move my glove.”

Suzuki’s abilities had been somewhat of a mystery, not only to fans but also to his teammates. He came from Japan with a reputation as a hitter who could rival the best Americans, but in a time before YouTube, his fielding exploits were not widely known.

His throw to get Long changed the perception of him from being a great hitter to being a great baseball player, and the Mariners rode his exceptional talent to a 116-win season in which Suzuki won the American League’s Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards.

The throw might have been what made people notice Suzuki, but the significance of the play was lost on him. When asked afterward about the throw, he showed off the aloof nature that he is still known for.

Photo

Ichiro Suzuki before a home game against the Red Sox on July 27.Credit
John Dunn for The New York Times

“The ball was hit right to me,” Suzuki said through an interpreter at the time. “Why did he run when I was going to throw him out?”

Long, while not a base-stealing threat at the major league level, had stolen 128 bases in the minor leagues and had the most speed on the Athletics, making the play seem more unlikely than if Suzuki had caught one of the team’s plodding sluggers. In the days that followed, Long had to answer for making an out at third in a close game, regardless of how impressive the throw was.

“It was going to take a perfect throw to get me,” Long told reporters. “And it was a perfect throw.”

Eric Chavez, the Athletics’ third baseman at the time and now a teammate of Suzuki’s with the Yankees, said they had been told that Suzuki had a strong arm but were not prepared for what happened.

“Terrence was a pretty fast runner, but Ichiro just came up with a hose,” Chavez said. “It was his ‘Here I am!’ moment as an outfielder.”

In spring training, Suzuki had made no attempt to impress anyone, including his teammates, with his fielding or his hitting, as he worked on various aspects of the game in preparation for the season. He routinely fouled pitches off to the opposite field, later revealing he was trying to see as many pitches as possible from the opposing pitchers.

“He had very few hits and was pounding the ball into the ground,” Bell said. “A lot of us were like ‘Can he hit? Can he play?’ He looked overmatched at times. It was all part of his plan, obviously.”

Once the regular season started, Suzuki immediately showed that his hitting skills were as advertised, collecting 12 hits in his first seven games. But nothing he had done had led the team to believe he had the power and pinpoint aim to make the type of throw they would soon witness.

“No, I really did not,” Bell said when asked if he thought there would be a play at third. “It took a perfectly placed throw for us to have a chance to get him out. With a runner like that, and a ball hit like that, there is no play.”

Almost instantly there were reports that scouts were advising their teams not to test Suzuki’s arm, which Bell said he believed gave an already talent-loaded Mariners team an even greater advantage.

“It sent a message,” Bell said. “You know a guy can throw like he can, a lot of times you don’t even challenge it. It’s not just the plays that he throws runners out, but he shuts down the teams from even trying to score.”

Photo

On this play in April 2001, Suzuki, playing for Seattle, made a pinpoint throw to catch Terrence Long of Oakland at third base.Credit
MLB

Over the next decade, Suzuki continued to impress not just with his arm but also with his ability to cover ground in the outfield, collecting 10 Gold Gloves and, perhaps more impressively, three Fielding Bible awards.

Voted on by a panel of experts that includes John Dewan, Bill James, Joe Posnanski and Rob Neyer, the Fielding Bible award is a statistics-minded alternative to the Gold Glove, and only Yadier Molina and Albert Pujols have won more than Suzuki’s three.

Over the past few seasons, however, as Suzuki has regressed at the plate, his fielding has taken a turn for the worse as well. Last season he failed to win the Gold Glove and Fielding Bible awards, and he appeared to have reached his end as a top defensive player. But this season, at age 38, he has undergone a bit of a renaissance, again ranking among the game’s best right fielders.

Suzuki’s powerful arm, however, has begun to falter. Jose Bautista and Jeff Francoeur have surpassed him in terms of throwing runners out, and a more telling sign of his decline is that many runners no longer seem to fear him. Over the past three seasons, base runners tried to take an extra base against him nearly 50 percent of the time, a far cry from his best seasons of 2003 and 2004, when they tested his arm 37 percent of the time.

But Dewan, who runs the company Baseball Info Solutions and is among the pioneers in modern defensive statistics, said that a loss of arm strength did not affect Suzuki’s value much.

“Most people think his biggest asset is his throwing arm, but it’s not,” Dewan said. “It’s just simply the amount of ground that he covers out in the field, being alert and making plays that other right fielders don’t make.”

That is especially true this year, with Suzuki ranking as the best right fielder in the game according to Dewan’s preferred defensive statistic, runs saved. Despite that, Suzuki is expected to move to left field when the Yankees’ regular right fielder, Nick Swisher, is ready to play full time.

Suzuki, despite all the accolades, remains a student of the game defensively and is preparing for the adjustment.

“I have played center here before, but I haven’t played left,” Suzuki said when asked if Yankee Stadium would provide any challenges defensively. “It’s something that you can’t get from knowing the stadium. You have to experience it in the game.”

With Suzuki probably in the twilight of his career, it is unknown how long he can continue to be an elite defensive player, but he currently represents an improvement in the outfield for the Yankees even if his batting average does not rise drastically.

“He’s having a great defensive year,” Dewan said. “Think of it like a hitter having a good year when he’s older. You don’t expect it, but it’s happening.”

Bell said that he believed that it had everything to do with Suzuki being Suzuki.

“Knowing him a little bit, it’s not surprising,” Bell said of Suzuki’s success at an advanced age. “That’s just because of how he took care of himself. How he went about everything on and off the field, from diet to fitness. It was obvious that he was very calculated with every single thing he did. That’s why he’s such a great player and why he’s still playing so well.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 29, 2012, on page SP8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Throw That Made A Phenomenon. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe